Hello and welcome to Sobercast, where we provide A.A. Speaker Meetings and workshops in podcast format.

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basket we hope you enjoyed the podcast have a great day my name is dis as i told you last night i'm one of

the self-appointed historians in alcoholics anonymous and what we're going to do this morning is a doctor's opinion, which is this man right here,

in case you haven't seen pictures of him.

He really was kind of called a medical saint by members of AA in New York.

And when the first group conscience of alcoholics was held, it's held Nacron, Ohio in 1937 by about 22 or 23 people,

and they finally realized they had something good going, but they also knew that if they held it to themselves

and tried to pass it on verbally, it was going to lose a lot of its importance. So they had a vote, and they took a vote on whether they

was going to have a book or not. And even among all the skeptics and everything else, they voted

by two votes to have a book. And that the book, because Bill Wilson had more knowledge than anybody else about this disease,

they asked Bill to write the book.

And so Bill dictated this book to his first secretary, Ruth Hock,

who typed it up, double-spaced it on paper,

with the old paper in between, so she had copies, you know, what that used to be like?

Nobody knows that except Bob and I.

And the first two chapters he wrote was Bill's story, and there is a solution. And so he wanted to

find out whether the information in these two chapters had any importance to people that suffered

from this disease. So he sent it out to some doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists and and let them review it to find out

if he was really on the ball and was really doing what we needed to be done.

And they all reviewed it favorably.

In fact, he sent one to John Hopkins Hospital and the doctor there were in charge with Dr. Esther

...